Revisiting Powers

Is this on the DEV's charts? Are they going to tweak some of the existing powers and animations/sets and if so, are the resources required the same as building a new set. Is this something that could be taken care of with Power Customization?

do you have something specific in mind ?



Issue 16 was seen to include a change to electric armor (before the costume creator was locked), where conserve power was switch to be less effective and end rec, but include a self-heal component address a key hole in that set.

Issue 15 had the dominator revamp with most sets being tweaked a little.

Given that the last several issues have included either new sets or tweaks to existing sets - not to mention the tweaks to entire ATs (blaster, stalker, dominator) - I would think that *of course* that's on the Dev's radar.

Although my teachers always said "There's no such thing as a stupid question" I almost want to say that this is a silly question - but maybe there is a subcontext we don't know about here.

As Cat asked - what are you looking for specifically?

Power customisation has nothing to do with the actual mechanics of those powers, it's all for flavour. That's the way we've always wanted it.

I don't think there's a been a single issue without some changes, major or minor, to powers, enemies and ATs to improve balance, so yes, you are likely to see more changes in the future.

As for how much effort goes into those changes, you'd probably have to ask a dev, and they don't frequent this forum (and are increasingly secretive about new developments, due to complaining). I'm guessing a lot of them involve datamining and taking into account the word in the community, and the changes involves might simply be a matter of adjusting the numbers, or it might be changing the animation, or even re-envisioning what powers are supposed to do and how they can benefit the player.

There are two, three depending how you count it, aspects to a power.

1) The numbers. Activation and recharge times, endurance cost, damage dealt or healed, secondary effects, root time, interrupt time, range, etc. These being numbers that drive the "power engine", they can be changed quickly.

2) and/or 3) Animation and FX. This is what takes time and manpower when it comes to developing a totally new powerset. In some cases they can "borrow" existing animations from similar powers but most powers in new powersets have to be created from scratch. Same goes with any visual effects associated with the power or projectile fired at a foe.

And actually there is one last time consuming task when it comes to a new powerset and that is if the new power does something that the "power engine" doesn't do yet and has to be coded to add that ability. The combo system for Dual Blades for instance. And such changes may be more time consuming than even the adding animations and visual effects.